Béatrice Craig . Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists: The Rise of a Market Culture in Eastern Canada . Buffalo, N.Y. : University of Toronto Press . 2009 . Pp. viii, 349. $75.00.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Béatrice Craig documents the unfolding relationship between rural people and markets in the Madawaska region of northwestern New Brunswick and northeastern Maine for about a century following initial settlement in the 1780s. She offers a major contribution to historical writing on both sides of the border, situating her study at the leading edge both of Canadian considerations of the relationship between staples and local markets and American examinations of the rise of the market and the transition to capitalism. She charts the creation of a backwoods capitalism that resulted in large part from the many small economic decisions made by farmers, merchants, millers, and other local people. Acadians, followed closely by Catholics from Lower Canada, constituted the region's “pioneer generation.” They were attracted by the fur trade and, more importantly, the rich agricultural land along the upper Saint John River. Early settlers were market-experienced and early on created local and regional markets. Fur and wheat established their connection to export markets. These activities were mediated by a small group of “principal men” whose land speculation, personal connections, and ownership of mills, stores, inns, taverns, and other business ventures were key market conduits and a stimulus to economic growth. Midge, rust, and other factors destroyed the viability of the wheat crop and its distant market linkages after 1830. The growth of the timber industry and local demand by 1850 enabled a shift to fodder crops that found markets locally in lumber shanties and the local population. Consistent farm surpluses allowed most farmers to be market participants. By 1870 Madawaska farmers were reasonably well-off, their productivity comparable to Upper Canadian farms. But commercial farming did not result from modernization of production; rather, farmers increased labor input but continued to rely on traditional farming techniques.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.032 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".